“THE ATLANTIC” – From an Article By Alec Ross Entitled: “The Pentagon’s Army Of Nerds – Why the military needs Silicon Valley, now more than ever”
“When the technology sector has so much more expertise than the traditional defense sector, it is worth harnessing that expertise and ensuring that technology companies shoulder the responsibility for what they are making.
A system that allows companies to weigh in and even lead allows more informed innovation and implementation—and provides more checks and balances than a system in which the government decides and drives everything.“
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“The pentagon is not the most inviting place for first-time visitors, and it was no different for Chris Lynch. When he rode the escalator out of the Pentagon metro station, Lynch was greeted by guard dogs and security personnel wearing body armor and toting machine guns. He lost cell service upon entering the building and was forced to run through more than a half mile of hallways to make his meeting in the office of the secretary of defense. He showed up late and out of breath, his hoodie and gym shoes soaked with sweat.
It was a surreal experience, Lynch told me, and it marked the beginning of “the most delightful detour of my entire life.”
Lynch had just completed a 45-day posting in the United States Digital Service, an organization formed in 2014 to fill what many officials viewed as a crucial gap in the government’s technology expertise. That year, the White House had launched HealthCare.gov to help enroll Americans in government health insurance, but it had been a technological debacle that almost derailed the Affordable Care Act. The website was so buggy that on its first day, only six people were able to sign up through the site. In response, and to prevent similar flops from occurring in the future, the White House created the USDS. The group is meant to act as a SWAT team of technologists who can come in whenever a government system needs fixing.
Lynch’s first project at the USDS involved building software to let the Pentagon and the Veterans Affairs Department more reliably share veterans’ medical records. The problem his team sought to solve was simple but had severe consequences—the VA could accept the records only in PDF format, but sometimes the Pentagon would send them as JPEGs. As a result, doctors sometimes mistreated patients and overlooked underlying conditions merely because they had incomplete records. “If you have cancer,” Lynch said, “it could be literally the difference between life or death.”
Lynch and his team set about building file-conversion software that would reformat such misfiled records, and the effort was a success—so much so that when Defense Secretary Ash Carter wanted to spin up his own military-focused branch of the USDS, the Defense Digital Service, he tapped Lynch to lead it.
The Defense Digital Service was the reason Lynch found himself at the Pentagon that day in the summer of 2015. Before moving to Washington, D.C., Lynch knew nothing about the military. The closest he had come to the national-security world was watching Saving Private Ryan and Full Metal Jacket. He does not fit the stereotype of the military man, either. Lynch is 5-foot-9, slim, and in his own words, “very, very average for a human being.” He smiles often and boasts a pair of geometric tattoos, a Fibonacci spiral on his left biceps and a spiro-graph down the length of his right arm.
His dog—a miniature pinscher named after the film producer Dino De Laurentiis—is afraid of motorcycles. When I went on a walk with Lynch and Dino in March 2020, Chris wore a black fitted T-shirt, white Ray-Bans, and gym shoes with tie-dye laces. The look spoke more to his background in the Seattle start-up scene than his current role as one of the top technologists in U.S. national security.
Lynch also came in with the skepticism of the government that many in the tech industry share. There is a perception that “you can’t do anything in government because bureaucrats don’t care about technologists … it’s a waste of your talents,” Lynch told me. When a friend of Lynch’s shared that he was going into government through the U.S. Digital Service, Lynch told him flat out, “That is the dumbest fucking idea I’ve ever heard.”
Chris Lynch ran the Defense Digital Service before founding Rebellion Defense, one of a new breed of government contractors. (Courtesy of Christopher Michel).
Edelman explained that certain types of AI can be more easily weaponized than others and that “those are the sorts of implementations that it is entirely appropriate to regulate, and frankly, government’s a little bit behind the ball in identifying them.”
U.S. military leaders have begun to stress the importance of AI ethics, and in 2020, the Pentagon signed on to a set of five broad principles for the ethical application of the technology. However, these principles are vague, and contain platitudes such as that “personnel will exercise appropriate levels of judgment and care” when developing and using AI.
Today’s geopolitical landscape is not as binary as it was during the Cold War, and countries cannot be classified as either “allies of democracy” or “allies of communism.” Political and economic models fall on a spectrum from open to closed, with lots of gradations in between, and national alliances are not as fixed as they once were.
Chris lynch and other members of the cyber-military-industrial complex are navigating this new world largely on their own. This puts them in a position where they need to formulate clear principles for the types of technology they are willing to develop, and what goes too far. This is a lot to ask of a company, and it cannot handle those tasks wholly on its own. The challenge is exacerbated when the technology executive is young and may be a great engineer but does not have much experience in the world of geopolitics. There is a difference between intelligence and wisdom, and I have seen too many mistakes made by technology executives who are very intelligent but not yet wise. I recall an example from my own time in government when a mobile app developed in California became a favorite tool of the Assad regime, which used it to identify political enemies. In another case, a well-intentioned mobile video program unwittingly gave conflict-zone intelligence to militias in the east Congo.
At the same time, when the technology sector has so much more expertise than the traditional defense sector, it is worth harnessing that expertise and ensuring that technology companies shoulder the responsibility for what they are making. A system that allows companies to weigh in and even lead allows more informed innovation and implementation—and provides more checks and balances than a system in which the government decides and drives everything.
For Rebellion Defense founder Chris Lynch, that sense of responsibility is a motivating force. “If you have strong opinions about national defense and security and the utilization of all these technologies that are ultimately going to change the world over the next 50 years, you have an obligation to show up at the table,” Lynch said. “You are providing the things that people need, and you’re helping craft the strategy, the policy, the implementation, and the execution of how those technologies will be used.”
At Rebellion Defense, employees meet once a month to discuss the types of projects and customers the company would refuse to take on. For example, Lynch said, the company has already determined that it will not build domestic surveillance technology, nor will it aid U.S. officials in rounding up undocumented immigrants. Lynch was reluctant to disclose Rebellion’s other lines in the sand, though he said the company has turned down multiple offers based on feedback from employees.
In a world of self-regulation, these decisions and the processes that produce those decisions will vary widely from company to company.
In September 2017, Google began working with the Pentagon on a broad artificial-intelligence initiative called “Project Maven.” Google’s particular project sought to build AI software that could sift through the troves of footage collected each day by military drones. The system would save intelligence officers from the tedious task of analyzing the footage frame by frame. (This is the sort of geospatial-analysis software that would fall under the government’s January 2020 export controls.)
Within months, Google employees began protesting the project, which they argued would help the Pentagon better target its drone strikes. In April 2018, some 3,100 employees signed a letter demanding that Google stop participating “in the business of war.” Soon after, Google declined to renew its contract with the Pentagon.
Chris Lynch disagreed with the decision by Google’s management to give in to employee pressure. As he saw it, Google forfeited an opportunity to directly influence how the Pentagon uses artificial intelligence. Instead, the contract went to Anduril Industries, a defense-technology company co-founded by Palmer Luckey, a controversial libertarian in his 20s who helped invent the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset.
Anduril was contracted to build an AI-powered sensor network that would provide troops with a virtual view of the front lines. The sensors would be mounted on drones, fixed towers, and troops themselves, and used to identify potential targets and direct autonomous military vehicles into combat. The software helps troops in the field make real-time operational decisions. It might not directly decide who lives and who dies, but it will significantly influence how troops arrive at that answer.
Anduril went on to build a similar AI-sensor network to help U.S. Customs and Border Protection to coordinate operations along the U.S.-Mexico border. When asked in 2018 whether there were any Pentagon projects Anduril would turn down, Luckey punted, saying, “That’s not really totally up to us. We are working with the U.S. government.”
That said, Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf told me there was one thing the company would not do: It would not build systems that execute “lethal force” without a human in the loop. In other words, Anduril will not create robots that can kill on their own accord.
“This is a military decision-making responsibility—it can’t be outsourced to a machine,” he said. “Everything else is one of these questions where I think it’s mostly a matter of the controls on how the technology is employed. There are very few other technology areas that I think have those sort of bright lines.”
Schimpf thinks it is the responsibility of military leaders to set those controls, and he trusts them to make the right call in the end. “Any of these [applications] that are too out-there, they eventually get shut down, they eventually get stopped. The U.S. system may take a while, but it is quite robust to keeping a lot of these overreaches in check.” That all three companies ended up resolving on different principles in the development of AI might seem worrying—but that is also part of the debate that needs to happen with such new technologies. There are no clear-cut ethical answers at the start.
Realistically, the Pentagon does not have much choice in whether to develop its artificial-intelligence capabilities. China and Russia are investing heavily in military AI, and the national security of the U.S. and its allies will suffer if it does not do the same. Russian President Vladimir Putin recently remarked to a group of students, “Artificial intelligence is the future not only of Russia but of all mankind,” and added that “whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.”
For companies that build facial-recognition and other technologies that can empower authoritarian regimes, that also means being responsible about their customer base. Claiming ignorance is no longer a valid justification, said R. David Edelman, the former White House senior official. “It is no longer an acceptable excuse for a tech CEO to say, ‘Well, I didn’t know what use they were going to put it to.’ The sort of near-criminal negligence that we heard from tech CEOs of even three years ago is simply no longer plausible in today’s era.”
Technology companies have the expertise that makes technology applications possible and reliable. But it is also important for technology companies to have the autonomy to decide how their relationship with the national-security community will proceed, and to develop clear principles for how what they build can be used. If they have an objection to specific applications of AI that they feel pressured to develop, it is worth voicing those objections, in a way that other companies and policy makers alike can weigh.
“Now more than ever, we need to bring technologists into a place where they can help shape and craft the policies and the direction of not only how these technologies will be built, but how they will be used,” Lynch said. “If the conversation is only happening in the Department of Defense, that is not a long-term strategy. If the conversation is only being had in a coffee shop in San Francisco with a bunch of people who have never spent a moment thinking about the mission of defense, those people are failing just as much. If you don’t bring those two sides together, there is one thing I am 100 percent certain of, and that is that nobody will be happy with the outcome.
If you don’t have that discussion, and if you don’t participate in that discussion, we end up in complete and total failure.”
Alec Ross is the author of The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People—and the Fight for Our Future. He is a distinguished visiting professor at Bologna Business School of l’Universitá di Bologna and served as Senior Adviser for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.”
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